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Celebrate National Nursing Week with the Health Sciences Archives and a Guest Blog Post!

We are so pleased to welcome a guest post on our blog today. David Rayside is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, and was founding director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, at the University of Toronto. His writing has included books on sexual diversity, political conservatism, and the role of religion in Canadian public life. He has paired this writing with an activist engagement on issues related to gender and sexual diversity. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

David's current research has brought him to the Health Sciences Archives where he has been delving into the life and career of his great-aunt, Edith Rayside, who was Superintendent of Nurses at Hamilton General Hospital from 1924-1934. Edith's story is a fascinating one and we asked David to recount it for us here, in celebration of National Nursing Week. While we take time to celebrate the nurses who work tirelessly today, it is also important to remember and honour the nurses who paved the way into modern times.

Our thanks to David for sharing this excellent profile of a trailblazer with us. Enjoy!

Thursday, May 9, 2019

Celebrate National Nursing Week with the Health Sciences Archives and a Guest Blog Post!

Edith Rayside was Superintendent of Nurses at the Hamilton General Hospital for a decade starting in 1924. This was a formative period in that institution’s growth, and Edith was sought out for that position because of an already distinguished career. This was also a time when nurses were securing recognition as a profession, and Edith was a leader in the drive to enrich their training and enhance their standing.

I came to this story in part because she was my father’s aunt. She died in 1950, when I was three, so I never knew her, but my father’s few references to her talked of her leadership of Canadian military nurses in World War I. He had a small file on her left by his father, but apart from that there were no personal papers – anywhere. As I have wound down my academic commitments as a political scientist, I have ramped up my inquiries into Edith’s story, to some extent building on my long-standing interest in the social and political dimensions of gender inequality. Edith’s story of a Canadian woman forging a path in a world even more dominated by men than our current one was irresistible.

Edith was born in 1872, and grew up in a very small village (now called South Lancaster) on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario. Her father was in the lumbering business, and the family’s comparative prosperity made further education conceivable, and in 1896 Edith completed a B.A. at Queen’s University. Nurse training schools were opening up, and this provided one of the few avenues for women to acquire professional training, and in 1901 she completed a three-year program in the newly opened St. Luke’s Hospital in Ottawa. Like most of her colleagues, she had a stint of “private nursing,” but then took advantage of still-scarce work openings in public health, and then nursed in a modern fully-equipped hospital in a central Mexican mining town, soon becoming superintendent.

The declaration of war in 1914 led to a dramatic expansion of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, including nurses. From five permanent nurse positions prior to August of that year, there would soon be hundreds, and eventually over 2,000. Applicants flooded in from young women who had completed a three-year training program – that was the requirement, and those selected were commissioned as army lieutenants.

Edith signed up, and because she had already accumulated such varied experience, she was eagerly accepted into the CAMC, and soon after her arrival in England was designated matron of a hospital unit that set to establish itself in northern France. She and her nurses arrived at a point when tents were still being set up for a hospital expected to quickly grow to over 1000 beds – all in tents at the beginning. They were soon receiving 200 wounded soldiers at a time, among them the first victims of gas poisoning, and others with the almost unimaginable wounds from what had become a mechanized war. The matrons of field hospitals such as this bore huge responsibilities for overall administration, as well as for maintaining nurse morale in what at times were dreadfully trying circumstances.

In the fall of 1916, Edith was transferred to Moore Barracks, a south-of-England facility rapidly expanding as a major convalescent centre for Canadian soldiers, and a training site for newly arriving medical personnel preparing for transfer to the continent. Then in mid-1917, she was transferred back to Ottawa to serve as Matron-in-Chief of the rapidly growing corps of military nurses stationed in military hospitals at home, a position she held until her demobilization in 1920.

Edith’s wartime contribution was recognized by her 1917 receipt of the Royal Red Cross medal (1st class). Back home, at a special post-war convocation ceremony in 1919, she became the first woman given an honorary degree by the University of Toronto. In contrast to the doctorates given to the military men at that event, she was given an honorary masters of household science, bizarrely evoking domesticity for a woman who had already been a formidable leader in settings that would have defeated most men. She was, as always, modest and grateful, wryly commenting (perhaps too optimistically) that the men would get used to women in positions of responsibility.

There were few opportunities for trained nurses after the war, but her experience made her an obvious candidate for an instructor position at the Montreal General Hospital, and after a few years there, made her an incomparably strong candidates for the nursing superintendent’s position at the Hamilton General. Under her direction, formal instruction was significantly expanded, and in particular by the addition of “theoretical” courses offered by classroom instruction, guided to a degree by the curriculum for nurses established in New York State. This was not replacing the practical apprenticeship approach that had long been central to nurse training, but was adding course work that would increase the professional distinctiveness of nursing.

Edith was by all accounts a strict disciplinarian, reflecting the norms of nurse training programs across the continent. Nurses had to show deference not only to hospital staff, but senior students. They rose at 6 in the morning, and had to be in uniform, with beds made and room tidy by the time they appeared for breakfast at 6:30. They were expected to attend church services on Sunday, even in this non-denominational institution, and Edith was among many nursing leaders who described nursing as Christian work.

In 1927, while at Hamilton General, Edith was asked to represent Canadian nurses at the dedication of the Memorial Chamber in the reconstructed (and renamed) Peace Tower in the central block on Parliament Hill. At the dedication ceremony, she was one of four service representatives who stood at the corners of the altar which held the Book of Remembrance, which recorded the names of the 60,000 Canadian soldiers and 47 nursing sisters who lost their lives in the war. She was the only officer among the four posted at the altar’s corners, the other service representatives being, in Edith’s words, “an Able Seaman, a Private Soldier and an Airman.”

In 1932, Edith became national president of the Overseas Nursing Sisters’ Association of Canada. She had been centrally involved in establishing networks of WWI veteran nurses from her time in Montreal. Through the 1920s she was also active in the Canadian Nurses Association during its formative years, and served in leadership positions in its “education” section.

At the Hamilton General, however, Edith was facing challenges. Much upheaval was generated by proposals for reorganization that were developed and eventually rejected, all in the lead-up to affiliation with McMaster University. Some of what had been recommended effectively sidelined the nursing superintendent in overall hospital decision-making, and the School of Nursing in general. Throughout the decade, and into the indefinite future, nurse superintendents in Canadian hospitals faced a constant struggle to assert an important role in decision making in the face of a male-dominated medical hierarchy.

In late 1931, she had to leave her post temporarily for an operation on a brain tumour requiring a trip to Boston. That operation saved her life, and allowed her to return to work in May 1932, but failing eyesight caused by glaucoma forced her to announce her resignation at the end of 1933, to take effect early in the new year. Edith’s departure was marked by much regret, and warm tributes. The Hamilton Herald reported on the “genuine respect and affection [for] this big-hearted and able woman...What a tribute to a woman occupying such a position, that in all the time she has been here we have never heard anyone speak of her save with admiration and regard...She has emanated strength, dignity and humanity, the very highest qualities of leadership."

Just days after announcing her retirement in late 1933, she was informed that she was included in Britain’s Christmas Honours list. The practice of including Canadians in royal honours lists had been resumed (briefly as it turns out) by Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in 1933. Edith was named as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her service during the war and in subsequent years. Her response to a reporter for Toronto’s Mail & Empire was to declare that she could not understand why she was singled out (31 December 1933).

Edith retired to the village of her upbringing, living with her younger sister Isabella McGillis and her large family. By the late 1940s, she was very hard of hearing and nearly blind, but the liveliness of the household’s children and grandchildren cheered her. She was capable of bemusement in talking of her afflictions, and able to say with deep sincerity how much of life she had seen.

She died in her bedroom on December 20th, 1950 at the age of 78. That afternoon, her sister sent a telegraph to Edith’s successor at the Hamilton General, knowing what fond memories remained of her time there. Her friend Charlotte Whitton, soon to be mayor of Ottawa, wrote a powerful obituary, describing Edith as “every inch the Matron-in-Chief, tall and of massive, noble build,” but also “a gentle woman, quiet and soft-spoken” (Queen’s Review, December 1950). She talked about Edith having been “singularly happy” in Hamilton. Like so many of the nurses who served in World War I, Edith never married. She may have seen herself as beyond the marrying age, but the earliest stages of her career suggest that she also craved independence, and an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of ordinary people.

Edith was of a generation of nurses who forged a new profession against considerable odds. They were educated and trained at a time when women had almost no chances for professional employment, and their pathway to recognition was regularly impeded by men who denigrated their skills or thought women best suited to the domestic realm. Within the medical field, they had to fight for respect every inch of the way, in a struggle that continues to this day.